Intellectual Brownian Motion

Monthly Archives: July 2012

Collingwood’s main anchor store in the Blue Mountain Mall, Zellers, will close by March, 2013, according to a story in this week’s Globe and Mail. It is one of 29 scheduled to close in Ontario, and one of 64 across Canada.

As the Globe and CBC pointed out in their stories, with an average of 100 people per store, that means a net lost of around 6,400 jobs, Canada-wide.

The impact locally is much greater. 100 jobs in a community of 20,000 people is a lot, even if most are part time.

Many retail outlets and supermarkets here offer only part-time work. People often have two or three of these jobs, just to get by. A single mother I worked with briefly had a job at a local supermarket, and as a housekeeper – both paying minimum wage – while trying to raise two kids.

If the workplace is unionized, the best most employees can get is 28 hours a week, forcing them to find other sources of income to make a livable wage. If you don’t have the seniority, you may not be able to get more than four hours a week in a union operation. And out of that you have to pay a minimum $7 in union dues, which gets you… well, nothing that I could see when I had that position.

I doubt there are 100 jobs available here, even part-time, to pick up the loss of Zellers. People may have to look for work much further afield, which will only increase their expenses.

Collingwood was an industrial hub almost from its inception in 1858 to the late 1980s. Industry means jobs – generally better-paying jobs, full time, and usually with benefits. Aside from the famous shipbuilding (which was moved overseas by its owners in 1985), it has had a tanner, flour mills, a nail factory, carpet factory, pottery, aircraft parts maker, furniture maker, automobile wheel plant, automobile hose plant, backyard recreation set manufacturer, seat-belt plant, distillery, starch plant, automobile glass plant, designer glass plant, piezoelectric ceramic plant, house truss maker, candy manufacturer, and other factories.

Today, most of those have been long closed, although a few remain.

Instead we have mostly “McJobs” in the hospitality, food, service, tourism and retail sectors. These are usually minimum wage, part time, may involve shift work or evenings-weekend work, and have no benefits, no pensions, and little opportunity for advancement or raises. Often people need to hold multiple McJobs just top pay the rent and eat. These jobs certainly don’t provide the money for people to become homeowners, and it is a struggle to raise children well at these wages.

It’s not a story unique to Collingwood – most of Ontario has been facing the loss of industrial and manufacturing jobs since the early 1980s. It accelerated in the 1990s, not only because more jobs were being shipped overseas to serve the consumer demand for low-price/low-quality goods, but because of increasing automation. That latter is the reason you see fewer bank tellers today – they have been replaced by ATMs. Many big box stores have self-serve pay stations so they can reduce the need for human cashiers. Some restaurants like Tim Horton’s, have replaced bakers and cooks by bringing in pre-cooked, frozen food that simply gets reheated, not actually prepared, by the local staff.

Plus we have a growing number of seniors here who are not retiring, because they need more income than their old age security or government pension provides (the total being somewhere between abject poverty and utter despair, worse if you want to live under a roof, not a piece of cardboard, and you like to eat at least once a day – but don’t fret: your MPs and Senators have gold-plated lifetime pensions that ensure that they will never have to eat cat food, even if you – the taxpayers – do…).

Locally, we need to craft a new economic development strategy in Collingwood, one that takes into account the erosion of industry and manufacturing jobs, and the need to improve and develop our tourism-entertainment-recreation sectors so we can attract more visitors (creating the critical mass of visitors necessary to sustain current and new businesses, events and services.

“Can the simple act of recognizing a face as you walk down the street change the way we think?” Thus opens a story posted on Science Daily. “Or can taking the time to notice something new on our way to work change what we remember about that walk?”

Intriguing questions. The act of recognition, the act of discovery; both can change how we both process information about an act, and how we create a memory of it.

This novel finding suggests that our memory system can adaptively bias its processing towards forming new memories or retrieving old ones based on recent experiences. For example, when you walk into a restaurant or for the first time, your memory system can both encode the details of this new environment as well as allow you to remember a similar one where you recently dined with a friend. The results of this study suggest that what you did right before walking into the restaurant can determine which process is more likely to occur.

Does this mean that we can train ourselves to remember an event or an activity better by planning to notice things? Or by actively looking for something familiar? But remembering and retrieving, while they are both controlled by the hippocampus, they are competitive processes.

Previous scholarship has demonstrated that both encoding new memories and retrieving old ones depend on the same specific brain region — the hippocampus. However, computational models suggest that encoding and retrieval occur under incompatible network processes. In other words, how can the same part of the brain perform two tasks that are at odds with each other?
At the heart of this paradox is distinction between encoding, or forming a new memory, and memory retrieval, or recalling old information. Specifically, encoding is thought to rely on pattern separation, a process that makes overlapping, or similar, representations more distinct, whereas retrieval is thought to depend on pattern completion, a process that increases overlap by reactivating related memory traces.

To take advantage of this would require people to be very alert and aware, all the time, not by accident or coincidentally – as in the recognition of a familiar face encountered in a walk. In his masterwork, Walden (Chapter Two), Henry David Thoreau wrote,

Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.

Why is it that seeing one thing can trigger your awareness so that you notice other things, often completely unrelated to the first item?

“We’ve all had the experience of seeing an unexpected familiar face as we walk down the street and much work has been done to understand how it is that we can come to recognize these unexpected events,” said Lila Davachi, an associate professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology and the study’s senior author. “However, what has never been appreciated is that simply seeing that face can have a substantial impact on your future state of mind and can allow you, for example, to notice the new café that just opened on the corner or the new flowers in the garden down the street.”

The same face, the same building, the same tree seen at different times can trigger different responses. One day it might be surprise, another nostalgia, another indifference, and another anger. Why? Perhaps it’s because your brain is busily storing and retrieving all sorts of data, and on the way in or out, the pattern triggers other neurons that activates the emotional activity.

But why or how did this trait evolve? Is it a defence mechanism; something we needed when we came out of the forests into the open plains of Africa? Or is it something older, something from our reptilian past?

Does the same mechanism for memory and awareness affect animals? Dogs and cats, for example, have memories. But can they consciously control their awareness (which raises the question about whether animals are self-aware, to which I reply, yes, but how much awareness they can manipulate remains open to debate).

Another researcher added:

“We spend most of our time surrounded by familiar people, places, and objects, each of which has the potential to cue memories,” added Katherine Duncan, the study’s first author who was an NYU doctoral student at the time of the study and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University. “So why does the same building sometimes trigger nostalgic reflection but other times can be passed without notice? Our findings suggest that one factor maybe whether your memory system has recently retrieved other, even unrelated, memories or if it was engaged in laying down new ones.”

I remain fascinated by the development of these models of consciousness and the inner workings of neuroscience.

According to a recent story in Science Daily, new species of sea stars may have arisen in as little a time as 6,000 years.

Researchers studied the diversity in DNA sequences from sea stars of two related species to estimate how long it has been since the two species diverged. Their results showed a range from roughly 6,000 to 22,000 years ago.

That rules out some ways new species could evolve. For example, they clearly did not diverge slowly with genetic changes over a long period of time, but were isolated quickly.

Over the last 11,000 years, the boundary between cold and warm water in the Coral Sea has fluctuated north and south. A small population of the ancestral sea stars, perhaps even one individual, might have colonized a remote area at the southern end of the range then been isolated by one of these changes in ocean currents.

These two species of “cushion stars” – Cryptasperina pentagona and C. hystera – while they look very similar, are very different in many aspects – habitat and sex lives in particular.

Pentagona has male and female individuals that release sperm and eggs into the water where they fertilize, grow into larvae and float around in the plankton for a few months before settling down and developing into adult sea stars.
Hystera are hermaphrodites that brood their young internally and give birth to miniature sea stars ready to grow to adulthood.

Six thousand years is a remarkably short time for a significant evolutionary activity – about the entire length of recorded human history. And about as long as some creationist crackpots think the Earth has been in existence. But it’s not a one-speed-fits-all for evolutionary change. Even the longer 22,000 years is still remarkably short. That’s about when the first Europeans arrived in North America, or the length of the time it takes the remarkable planetoid, 2006 SQ372, to complete its orbit.

Earlier this year, Wired Magazine published a story about research to discover how long it would take for a mouse-sized animal to evolve to an elephant-sized one. And the answer was 24 million years.

That’s how many generations a new study estimates it would take to go from mouse- to elephant-sized while operating on land at the maximum velocity of change. The figure underscores just how special a trait sheer bigness can be.
“Big animals represent the accumulation of evolutionary change, and change takes time,” said evolutionary biologist Alistair Evans of Australia’s Monash University.
Evans and co-authors revisit a fossil record dataset of mammal body size during the last 70 million years, in a study published Jan. 31 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The data was originally used to describe the evolutionary growth spurts experienced by mammals soon after dinosaurs ceased to be Earth’s dominant animals.
The relative sizes of mouse and elephant skulls. To go from mouse-sized to elephant-sized would take at least 24 million generations.
For the previous 140 million years, mammals had been rat-sized or smaller. With dinosaurs significantly reduced, mammals had a chance to fill newly vacant ecological niches, particularly that of the large-bodied plant-eater.

But what about human evolution? We have a pretty good record of our species’ evolution over more than 4 million years, from the apelike Ardipithecus through Australopithecus, Neanderthal, Cro Magnon to us. But we are, like other animals, still evolving. And the rate of evolution may be speeding up.

Explosive population growth is driving human evolution to speed up around the world, according to a new study.
The pace of change accelerated about 40,000 years ago and then picked up even more with the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, the study says.
And while humans are evolving quickly around the world, local cultural and environmental factors are shaping evolution differently on different continents.
“We’re evolving away from each other. We’re getting more and more different,” said Henry Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who co-authored the study.
For example, in Europe natural selection has favored genes for pigmentation like light skin, blue eyes, and blond hair. Asians also have genes selected for light skin, but they are different from the European ones.
“Europeans and Asians are both bleached Africans, but the way they got bleached is different in the two areas,” Harpending said.
He and colleagues report the finding this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

And some birds may be evolving faster, too – depending on their colour. According to a story in Science Daily in May,

Researchers have found that bird species with multiple plumage colour forms within in the same population, evolve into new species faster than those with only one colour form, confirming a 60-year-old evolution theory.
The global study used information from birdwatchers and geneticists accumulated over decades and was conducted by University of Melbourne scientists Dr Devi Stuart-Fox and Dr Andrew Hugall (now based at the Melbourne Museum) and is published in the journal Nature.
The link between having more than one colour variation (colour polymorphism) like the iconic red, black or yellow headed Gouldian finches, and the faster evolution of new species was predicted in the 1950s by famous scientists such as Julian Huxley, but this is the first study to confirm the theory.
By confirming a major theory in evolutionary biology, we are able to understand a lot more about the processes that create biodiversity said Dr Devi Stuart-Fox from the University’s Zoology Department.

So much science, so much research that continues to prove Darwin’s original theory, albeit much refined today thanks to our genetic research. You have to wonder, then, why 46% of Americans and 42% of Canadians and many others in the world still believe in the nonsense of creationism nor the pseudoscience of “intelligent” design.

I blame the continued survival of creationism on our failing education system with its lack of emphasis on science and its lack of training in critical thinking; on our society’s growing distrust in and disrespect for intellectuals; and the increasing influence of fundamentalist religion in politics.

Tenor guitars have been around since the 1930s, possibly a few years earlier*, but they’ve never had a big following compared with six-string guitars. That seems to be changing, and I suspect it’s in part due to the incredible popularity of that other four-string guitar derivative: the ukulele.

In the past six-twelve months, I’ve been seeing more tenor guitars on the Net, including several new custom tenor guitars made by talented luthiers. New sites about tenor guitars have sprung up, too. Both new and vintage tenors are showing up on eBay in what seems to be increasing numbers. There’s even an annual gathering for tenor guitarists, perhaps more (the page linked above doesn’t actually say where the event takes place, and there are no maps, but it’s in the USA somewhere).

I hadn’t really given tenor guitars much thought, myself, until fairly recently. The only tenor guitarist I’ve ever known is Eugene Smith, who sometimes still plays here in Collingwood. But as a ukulele player, my interest in four- and eight- stringed instruments has widened to all sorts of instruments I’ve never really thought a lot about before (like bouzoukis). I suspect other ukulele players have also considered tenor guitars as a natural complement to uke playing, especially after trying a baritone uke.

I started playing ukulele in early 2008, put down my guitars shortly after, and never picked one up again once I got bitten by the uke bug (okay, I’ve picked them up, but not played one for more than a few minutes). I quickly gravitated to tenor ukes as the best size and sound for my own playing and finger size. Tenors have a 17″ scale compared to the 13″ scale of a soprano, which I found too cramped.

I started playing baritone uke more than a year ago, after I bought one on a whim from another uke player online. Baritones have a 19″ scale and I really enjoyed the space, and fuller sound. Last year I picked up another musical whim – a four-string cigar-box guitar. I just wanted something to challenge me and give me a different sort of sound to experiment with. It’s the full, standard 25″ guitar scale. While fun to play, the body of a cigar box instrument is small and limits tonal production. That got me interested in tenor guitars.

Many uke players look askance at baritones as too close to guitar scale to be considered a “real” ukulele. I have found them tonally rich, and the lower key suits my limited singing range for many songs.

I had to be in Toronto, last week, and my route into the downtown took me past the Twelfth Fret music store. What musician, even an amateur like me, can resist its siren call? I had to stop and see if they had any tenors for me to try. Only one, sadly: a 1936 Gibson priced at $999. Ouch: that’s a bit rich for my wallet, I’m afraid, but I did get to play it and compare it with a baritone uke (a Kala spruce top). I suppose for its age, the Gibson is not overpriced for most people. Since I’m not a pro nor a collector of vintage instruments, I decided to continue looking.

Mostly what I wanted to discover was how a tenor felt to hold and play: was the fretboard too narrow? Too wide? The stretch of fingers comfortable or not? How did it feel in my lap? The ergonomics of an instrument are very important.

Maybe it’s because some popular trends, even in music, seep more slowly into the Canadian consciousness, that the tenor has not taken hold here. Canada has been 10-20 years behind the USA in the tequila craze, and is at least six years behind the US, UK and Australia in the ukulele wave. Since tenor guitars seem to be a new revival, I suppose we should start to see Canadians take notice and for music stores to stock them somewhere around 2020.

I’ve called many music stores around Ontario asking if they had any, and none have – a few have responded with comments that they didn’t even know what a tenor guitar was. Yet there are at least two manufacturers – Gold Tone and Blue Ridge – who are making them (two acoustic models each; a solid and a laminate top). Gold Tone even sells a tenor resonator, metal-body model. Eastwood has a sold-body electric tenor.

I have all sorts of technical questions about a tenor resonator guitar, however, and whether the tension on the biscuit is sufficient for the cone to make the expected sound.** National made a metal-body tenor in the 1930s, and I believe the Gold Tone is homage to that.

Tenor guitars usually have a shorter scale than a standard guitar – 21 or 23 inches, although some new models seem to also share the guitar’s 25″ scale according to some comments I’ve read online. They have a narrow neck, but a big body – and steel strings. That makes them a sort of super baritone uke. However, tenor guitars traditionally have a different sort of tuning than a ukulele or guitar: often tuned in “fifths” to CGDA. Just like a tenor banjo.

A baritone uke and a guitar would be tuned DGBE. I don’t see any reason why I can’t tune one like a guitar. That would be easier than trying to learn an encyclopedia of new chord patterns.

The main attraction, for me, of a tenor guitar is the combination of large body (for fuller volume and tone production) and steel strings. While I love playing my nylon-stringed ukes, sometimes the music calls out for the more metallic, crisper sound of steel. It’s not better, just different. I also think that the combination of nylon and metal in different instruments would sound nice if I get back to recording some of my music.

All of which should suggest to readers that I intend to get one, and yes, I have found one on Kijiji and expect to pick it up next week. Actually I’m quite excited by the notion of having a new musical instrument to experiment with. Would that my talent matched my passion for playing…

~~~~~
* Tenorguitar.com says they’ve been around for “100 years or more” and that “‘Lyon and Healy’, whose main guitar brand name was ‘Washburn’, claimed to have invented the tenor guitar just after the turn of the twentieth century. Certainly tenor guitars must have been around in the latter part of the first decade of the twentieth century from the existence of published and dated instructional books for both the tenor guitar and tenor banjo from this period that still exist today.”
** Traditional biscuits are made of dense wood like ebony or rosewood. I suspect one could improve the energy transfer to the cone by using a piece of brass or even glass as a saddle. I’ve never found one of these resonator tenor guitars to play in a shop, so I don’t know how they are constructed. I am very curious to try one, however.

It seems a good week for mis-attributed Francis of Assisi quotes. Someone on Facebook posted an image with the following quote:
“He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
St. Francis of Assisi”

That’s simply “Francis of “Assisi” for the non-Catholics among us, of course. But even without the questionable transformation of mortal flesh into an immortal, supernatural being, Francis didn’t write those words.

This quote was written by Louis Nizer, an American lawyer (1902-1994). It might strike some as remarkable that a lawyer might have such profound words about art and heart, but that’s not the issue. The issue is who said it. And it wasn’t a Middle Ages religious person. Nizer was an accomplished trial lawyer, author, artist, lecturer, and advisor to some of the most powerful people in the worlds of politics, business, and entertainment, according to Wikipedia.

Francis actually had a lot to say, but it was, as far as I’ve read by and about him, very specifically religious in content. Very little of what Francis actually said translates well into this sort of bumper-sticker inspirational message the New Age loves so dearly (I often think Twitter, with its 140-character limit, was invented for the New Agers who desperately want everything to fit conveniently onto a bumper sticker).

Another alleged quote from Einstein is making the rounds. I’m not sure how anyone would not see this as a New Age sham quote. Poor Einstein: for a man of genius, he gets associated with the most mediocre pap.

Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.

I seem to have misplaced the link to one of the Facebook images for this misquote, but here’s a copy of it from another site. There’s an excellent comment on this and the danger of mis-attributed quotes on the Giawaken site (I have not explored the rest of their site’s content, but the home page content looks annoyingly New Age).

The author – Daria Boissonnas – writes, “relying on a fictional quote to inspire us, when the truth is so much stronger…We don’t need fictional quotes. We don’t need to induct Einstein into the New Age to make the New Age valid or “real”…A false attribution weakens the quote, weakens your argument, weakens your reputation, and weakens the public opinion of what you are doing.”

The author should also note that mis-quotes contribute to the general lowering of intellectual standards in literacy, history, science and education. They dumb us down. So does pseudoscience like astrology – I throw that in because the author’s home page has links to astrological claptrap, psychic flim-flammery and other New Age nonsense.

The Quote Investigator looked into this misquote earlier this year, and found that it actually derives from a new Age “channeller” (I’d add the adjective flaky but it seems redundant…) named Darryl Anka,sometime between 1996 and early 2000. Anka apparently was a special effects artist for several motion pictures, and a self-described “channeler” who, according to Wikipedia, says he communicated with supernatural beings:

Anka claims that he began to communicate, through trance-channeling, with an extra-terrestrial entity called Bashar in 1983. He describes Bashar as existing in a parallel reality, in a time frame that we perceive as the future.

I know, I know, I almost snorted tea through my nose laughing at that, too. Anka’s imaginary friend, Bashar, apparently told him that, ““Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality.” The quote incorrectly attributed to Einstein also appears on the page as part of Anka’s own muddled explanation of what he claims his imaginary friend said.

You gotta love pseudo-scientific gibberish. All the words look like they might mean something but when you start to analyse it, you see it’s just hot air. But then so is pretty much everything “New Age.” Perhaps it’s no wonder that a lot of these misquotes spring from the addled minds of New Agers.

This image highlights another problem in some of these posts: a misunderstanding of some words by those who want to create “inspirational” messages. In this case, the misunderstanding is in the word “karma.” Karma is about cause and effect; the wheel of samsara. It’s a cyclic process. Karma is not about either punishment or synchronicity.

This image does not say anything about what karma actually represents as a theological doctrine. I think the image’s creator had no understanding of what the word means, didn’t bother to look deeper to verify its meaning, so used it incorrectly as in this flaccid statement with obfuscated intent. In an era of Wikipedia and the .03 second time it takes to search for a word or phrase on Google, the failure to confirm the actual meaning of a word is sheer laziness or stupidity. Maybe both.

Buddhanet gives a fairly good explanation of what karma means, from which I quote at length:

Karma is the law of moral causation. The theory of Karma is a fundamental doctrine in Buddhism. This belief was prevalent in India before the advent of the Buddha. Nevertheless, it was the Buddha who explained and formulated this doctrine in the complete form in which we have it today.
…snip…
According to Buddhism, this inequality is due not only to heredity, environment, “nature and nurture”, but also to Karma. In other words, it is the result of our own past actions and our own present doings. We ourselves are responsible for our own happiness and misery. We create our own Heaven. We create our own Hell. We are the architects of our own fate.
Perplexed by the seemingly inexplicable, apparent disparity that existed among humanity, a young truth-seeker approached the Buddha and questioned him regarding this intricate problem of inequality:
“What is the cause, what is the reason, O Lord,” questioned he, “that we find amongst mankind the short-lived and long-lived, the healthy and the diseased, the ugly and beautiful, those lacking influence and the powerful, the poor and the rich, the low-born and the high-born, and the ignorant and the wise?”
The Buddha’s reply was:
“All living beings have actions (Karma) as their own, their inheritance, their congenital cause, their kinsman, their refuge. It is Karma that differentiates beings into low and high states.”

Like a mis-attributed quote, a misused word like this creates a bad meme that gets shared, further increasing the general misunderstanding. You might even say that a misquote like this creates bad karma for the one who spreads it…

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.” Allegedly by Mark Twain, but unlikely, and not found in any published source I have of Twain’s quotations. Online sources, of course, don’t count as authorities because they lack all credibility.

The fact that “Quora attributes it to him” is worthless. Quora is yet another one of those idiotic “quote websites” that misquote and misattribute things all the time.
Note that Quora doesn’t bother to give an actual citation — what book was it from, what page, etc. Without a full citation, you have no assurance that this was said by Mark Twain or Herbert Hoover or some random dude who made it up yesterday.
It doesn’t appear (as Twain’s or anybody else’s) in either the 14th or 15th edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. I suppose it’s possible that it comes from the newly released edition of his Autobiography, but I think it’s more likely that it’s just something misattributed by some stupid “quote website.”

These comments are applicable to almost every quote site I’ve found, with rare exception such as wikiquote.org. Most of these so-called quote sites are wastes of electrons because they share without qualification, without verification, without confirmation.

Every Child is an Artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up. Pablo Picasso. Again, another unsourced quote that does not appear in any reliable printed source such as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations or the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, or on Wikiquotes. In fact, not of the reliable quotations from Picasso I have read ever mention children at all.

Sometimes this comment is noted as “”Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” Other variations include “Every child is born an artist” and this one: “Every child is born an artist. The problems begin once we start to grow up.”

I have not been able to identify the actual source of these words; every Internet site I have encountered sheepishly repeats the words or images, without bothering to identify where or when Picasso said them. Personally, I expect to discover they were made by some more modern educator rather than the late artist Picasso. Or perhaps part of it was taken from this Talmudic comment on poem by Isabella McCullough:

Every child is a poet.
Every child is an artist.
Every child is a philosopher.
Every child is a theologian.
Every child is an actor.
Every child is a dancer.
Every child is a nature-lover.
Every child is an explorer.
Every child is a comedian.
Every child is a skeptic.
Every child is a teacher.
Every child is a boundary pusher.
Every child is a truth speaker

“Everything we see is a shadow cast by that we do not see. The invisible is a shadow cast by the invisible.” Martin Luther King Jr. This is actually a quote by King, but not the full portion, so it’s misleading. It has been taken out of context and turned into a soppy, New Age bumper sticker slogan.

It is taken from a sermon given by King on April 21, 1957, titled “Questions that Easter Answers.” The full quotation is:

Easter tells us that everything we see is a shadow cast by that we do not see. The invisible is a shadow cast by the invisible.

In other words, King wasn’t making some deep Platonic comment about the shadow-vs-truth nature of the world, but rather a very specific observation on the nature of Christian belief, and even more specifically about what the Christian observance of Easter teaches Christians. It is not a general comment on life, nor was it ever meant to be used as such.

Comments taken out of context like this are as dangerous and stupid as mis-attributed quotations.

Mark Twain actually said, (in a letter to George Bainton, 15 October 1888, solicited for and printed in George Bainton, The Art of Authorship: Literary Reminiscences, Methods of Work, and Advice to Young Beginners (1890), pp. 87–88.
sourced from Wikiquote): “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”

A book commits suicide every time you watch Jersey Shore. Just a peripheral comment on the nature of literacy; watching TV rather than reading is one of the reasons people are not critical thinkers, able to actually identify or confirm whether these are real or faux quotations. Most people simply pass them along unchecked because they confirm some sort of existing belief – “epistemic closure” it’s called.

Bella’s wisdom

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. It is an exercise which always involves a certain number of internal contradictions and even a few absurdities. The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.
John Kenneth Galbraith,
“Stop the Madness,” Interview with Rupert Cornwell, Toronto Globe and Mail (6 Jul 2002)

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He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. That has to rank among the best opening lines in a novel, up there with Dickens’ “It was the best of times…” opening in A Tale of Two Cities. This line, however, is from [...]

Patronage is the dirty secret behind most nations and governments. It’s a shameful, embarrassing, corrupt and very undemocratic practice in which friends, supporters and benefactors get plum contracts, jobs, appointments, cash, perks and bonuses.

These are usually parcelled out not on the basis of achievement, ability, or talent, but rather [...]

I continue to be profoundly moved by the wisdom of the classical authors. It’s often hard to accept that some of them were writing two or more millennia ago: many seem so contemporary they could have been written this century.